Pages

Saturday, 28 January 2017

Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017), a Nigerian novelist who lifted women.

On Wednesday,
January 25, 2017, the world lost one of the finest writers that emerged from
African literary space, novelist Buchi Emecheta. She passed away in her sleep,
aged 72, at her care home in London.

Buchi Emecheta (1944-2017

Few of her 20
works include Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave
Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979).Born in Lagos,
1944, Emecheta moved to England in 1960 with her husband Sylvester Onwordi, to
whom she had been engaged from the age of 11. The author’s personal life is as
interesting as some of the stories she has fictionalised. For example, in her
1974 autobiography Second Class Citizen,she describes the relationship of her
love life as unhappy and sometimes abusive. She discloses how her husband
sometimes burnt manuscripts of her work. So, when she was 22, Emecheta left her
husband, becoming a single parent to support her five children. She also completed
a Sociology degree at the University of London while contributing as a
columnist to a newspaper, New Statesman. She later published contents of the
column as a book Into the Ditch in 1972.One of her most
famous works was The Joys of Motherhood, an experience of raising children as a
single parent. In 1976, her first play, A Kind of Marriage, lifted her career
further when shown on BBC TV. The work was adapted into a play 10 years after just as
she also published her autobiography Head Above Water.